Broken Clocks
by crimewaves
Summary: "Skulduggery, I'm real." Skulduggery's stranded with the Faceless Ones, and he doesn't believe he's going to be rescued.  one shot .


**B**r**o**k**e**n**C**l**o**c**k**s

"Skulduggery, I'm real."

The hallucination had a set expression on her face, and seemed to be itching to cross her arms defensively. She managed to stop herself, and Skulduggery noted the look of slight disbelief in her eyes and thought _what a strange one_. Really, his hallucinations were usually like Valkyrie's reflection, with glassy eyes and wide empty grins and plenty of show tunes... Well, maybe not like the reflection in that aspect, no, but they were distinctly non human, and this one...wasn't.

She wasn't like Valkyrie's reflection at all, or even Valkyrie, if he was honest. He wondered if this meant his memories of his life were fading like his sanity, and then he wondered if that was a bad thing. Possibly –probably- not, although he bet Valkyrie would be upset if he disappeared into nothing. Actually this Valkyrie seemed upset about the thought of it too, although she was altogether too hopeful to be deterred. Poor thing must think she's real. He smiled indulgently.

"That's the spirit."

"No, I mean I'm really real, and I've come to take you home." The hallucination seemed to be on the verge of scowling and looking surprised, an odd combination that only his old partner would be capable of. The look came out pleading, and the dark eyes shone with more feeling and dimension he usually imagined them to have. His imagination, he deduced, must be increasing with his powers and insanity. Yes, that was quite a reasonable explanation. He decided to tell fake Valkyrie how odd she was.

"You're an odd one. Usually my hallucinations do more singing and dancing." Yes, he remembered her doing a rather astounding electric guitar the other week (day? Month?) and she could do a rather hilarious scowling rendition of Over The Rainbow. Even funnier when she decides to wear the dress and bow. Imagined Valkyrie looked alarmed and still resolved. He watched her more closely.

"It's me. It's Valkyrie."

Funny thing was, this hallucination didn't look like Valkyrie. Not only was she not singing and dancing, but she looked slightly and subtly different. This Valkyrie had longer, darker hair, and her jaw and brow seemed more set and defined. And by God, she was tall. A tall, lean silhouette set against the large sun, distinctly taller and leaner and darker than he remembered. The Valkyrie he remembered was a child, sort of. She definitely wasn't a child, and she was very strong, much stronger than anyone who he had ever known at that age, but she was still very small and young when she stood amongst all the mages who had at least half a century on her. This Valkyrie wasn't like he remembered. Again, Valkyrie was shorter, and he couldn't imagine why he (even in madness) would make a hallucination loftier. Short people always gave taller people ego boosts from whichever angle they looked at it, and Skulduggery _liked_ ego boosts. Liked them a little too much in Valkyrie's opinion, but then, she could be just as bad; would be just as bad, one day-No. He remembered sadly. He was dead now to her, no chance of rescue, and the chances of her developing an ego like that without him around were virtually nonexistent. He focused on the hallucination.

"You'd be surprised how many figments of my imagination say that. You don't happen to have an imaginary chessboard with you, do you? I've had a hankering to play for a while now, and since you're an aspect of my personality, you'd probably be a worthy opponent."

Now the hallucination looked cross.

"How do I prove to you that I'm real?"

That was interesting preposition. A hallucination trying to prove it wasn't a hallucination. None of the other hallucinations tried to do that. They didn't speak really... they just sang old songs he used to hum as he drove through the damp Dublin nights in his Bentley, or they whispered. Whispered the most awful things, about his past and his life and all the terrible_terrible__**awful**_ things he had done, things that meant it was better for him to be trapped where he could suffer, where he couldn't corrupt anyone young and impressionable, like little girls with sharp tongues and dark eyes. False Valkyrie still hadn't budged, and her voice was as flat and forthright as ever, not even the hint of a note of a song. Skulduggery mused to himself.

"Intriguing. It's not as if you could tell me something only we would know because if I know it, my hallucinations would know it." Hallucinations knew everything. They came out of the dark corners of his mind, and forced him to remember. "But in the theoretical extension of that approach, "he continued, wishing he had arms to gesture with, "If you were to tell me something only you would know, then that would prove to me that I'm not conjuring you up from my mind."

Her lips pulled up a bit, not quite reaching a smile, but reaching her eyes.

"So... what will I tell you? My deepest, darkest secret? My earliest memory? My ultimate fear?"

My, this Valkyrie had definitely inherited his vocabulary. She was quite life like, actually, and he felt quite proud that he had managed to imagine her so vividly, twisted though that was. Talking to her was like talking to the real Valkyrie, and he suddenly missed her. This one was too tall, and last time he had seen her, she had been much shorter. Narrow too, and unsure and wide eyed. This one looked quite angry, truth be told, as though she had a determined expression permanently etched onto her face. Though not out of place (Valkyrie was nothing if not strong willed) still, the permanence bothered him a little, like his Imagined Valkyrie was still getting more jaded and less impressed by the world around her, which was a true shame, as Skulduggery enjoyed the almost awestruck looks she still displayed when presented with something particularly magical and unexpected. He had thought that maybe she would have froze while he was gone, never grown up without him there to see it. It hadn't really occurred to him that time would still function on home soil without him there, and it struck him that that said some negative and magnificent things about his ego.

Time was going on in Ireland, and in Haggard and in Hell, which was the only name he could possibly attribute to this place. Okay, the planet was, in the indigenous dialect, actually called 'Nimo Calsiferous' but Hell had a nice ring to it, and suited it a lot better, so he called it Hell. Or the Nether World, if he wanted some variety. Whatever it was called, Skulduggery knew he was not leaving this place. This Valkyrie wasn't real, and there was no rescue mission, no sidekick with her typical, not-thought-out rescue type plans. He was at a dead end here, just as surely as the Faceless Ones that tormented him daily, in a manner similar to Prometheus. Each night it would end, and each day would begin anew. In between there were the shadows that leapt out of the recess of thoughts in his empty skull, and they wore the faces of the people who he had known and loved, known and trusted, occasionally even known and hated.

Most looked like Valkyrie. Some looked like China, some like Ghastly, others like Serpine. A visual cacophony of faces, complete with dance routines and catchy tunes. They never came in pairs, and Skulduggery wasn't sure if he was grateful or not. Probably was, but he couldn't deny that it would be nice to have another fake person to shift his attention to, and verbal sparring wouldn't be quite so one sided if there were three participants.

Maybe he could have tracked down other survivors from this planet. They had once lived here in this city of stone and millions of footprints, but they had died shortly after he learned the dialect. No magic. These peoples hadn't possessed magic like he did, and it was probably why they had survived for as long as they had. Faceless Ones are strange creatures, and he thought that maybe they were like those creatures in the cave beneath Gordon's estate; that is, attracted to magic. Except the Faceless Ones _were_magic, so surely they would be disabled by those mysterious minerals like most magicians...

Magic or not, the native people ended up dead. The portal pulled the Faceless Creatures here; its gravity and existence as irresistible as that of a black holes to any scraps of light that were on the wrong side of the event horizon. The people died in droves, splintering and rupturing all over the warm cobbles. What was left was pitiful; scared, bony people huddling in basements and niches in the mountain walls, clutching their children close and thanking him profusely for giving himself up, giving them one more day... And then even that had ended, their deaths as sudden and violent as a rolling pin descending on dough.

That was when the regular torture began. With no people left to kill or bodies left to mutilate they turned to the skeleton, and if they had a mouth, he knew it would be smiling. As the weeks passed, he discovered the libraries and it was there he found some measure of comfort, in the break between the hours spent in terrible, screaming pain. The 'books' were more like tablets- heavy and brittle, although these alien things were definitely hardier than they looked. The language, though, was reminiscent of northern runes, merged with a strange looping script. For three months he had scoured those runes feverishly as though the very lines were a mantra, using them to block out his dark thoughts, to give him some other entertainment besides the hallucinations that would sing and dance and_ act_ friendly only to turn vicious as soon as they fell under the evenings long and twisted shadows.

He had liked the script of the language. Don't get him wrong; he couldn't make head or tail of it, but he had liked stranger things (Valkyrie being the prominent example) and the squiggles had an entertaining look to them. Before his subconscious became better versed in choreography, he would dare say that the 'written words' danced better then False Valkyrie did. False Ghastly too, actually. Maybe False China on a bad day, although the lines could never outshine Nefarian Serpine's superb robot dance (a groovy thing that he was slightly disturbed to realise that he knew it well enough to subconsciously force a hallucination to do it.)...

In the present, the hallucination of Valkyrie had one eyebrow raised, waiting for her question. He was pleased to ask:

"How about what you had for breakfast this morning?"

"Honey Loops." She answered promptly, looking vaguely triumphant. Ah, the good old best friend dynamic. Shame she wasn't real.

"Well, there you go."

"So now you believe I'm real?" she dared to look hopeful.

"Not in the slightest. I may have just made that up." Convincing as this hallucination was, he couldn't deny he enjoyed bursting its bubble, just ever so slightly.

"I found your skull-the one the goblins took." False Valkyrie burst out, and his hypothetical eyebrows rose into his hypothetical hair (which he was sure was as immaculate as ever-the Faceless Ones could torture him, drive him insane, and take away all he had ever known, but he'd be damned if he let them muss up his imaginary hair). Valkyrie continued –"Fletcher used it as an Isthmus Anchor to open the portal and I came through to take you back."

Hope beat in his chest all of sudden, reminiscent of his long silenced heartbeat.

"It makes sense, doesn't it? It's possible, right?"

"It's... very possible actually."

"Did you think of it? Did you imagine your skull could be used as an anchor?"

No, he hadn't.

"I didn't, but then I have been preoccupied by the torture and the lack of good conversation." He suddenly wondered if Faceless Ones could talk. Then he wondered if this Valkyrie was real. He was doubtful of it, but a very sudden, very real jolt of fear buzzed in his knuckle bones. What if this really _was _Valkyrie? That would mean she was here, with him, in a realm with a party of evil gods who all implicitly wanted to kill her more violently than they had ever tortured him. That was not what he had ever envisioned for her future _(liar...you knew she wouldn't be safe with you_). Okay, so he had his doubts every now and then, but this was a really, really _bad_ place to be, and he wasn't sure if he wanted her with him or not.

"So if this is something that you hadn't thought of yet, how could I come up with it if I were just a figment of your imagination?"

Skulduggery stared, just for a fraction of a moment. This Valkyrie could be real...Then again, she might not be. Murphy's Law, he decided. His mind was cruel, and she wasn't real. Couldn't be, because Valkyrie was a small figure that had ran beside him until he dashed ahead and she faded into the past, un-aging and unreal when she appeared before him, dream-like. There was no escape for him- now or ever. He was trapped here, his bones his chains, damned to suffer and scream and pay for being what he was, an abnormality, an anomaly, something with no right to exist.

It was proved to him- the thick walls of the library had not kept payment out. The Faceless Ones had torn through the walls like they were paper, and then all the books and weirdly dancing scripts were gone. Even his hallucinations were going stale- warping gradually, becoming more shadow-like, echoes of what they were. This Valkyrie wasn't anything: just some last ditch attempt to prove to himself that his memories weren't fading. And look what it had got him- an inaccurate Valkyrie, with too long a shadow and a coat with red sleeves and handfuls of false hope that would only twist his arm.

She couldn't be real. She_couldn't_ be.

"I'm not your subconscious." She says. "I'm Valkyrie. I'm real. And I'm here to rescue you."


End file.
